The Personal Is Historical: Slate's Memoir Brothers Underscores Race, Loss, and Family

Nico Slate recounts growing up in a multiracial family with a Black brother, reflecting on how they experienced the world differently and lamenting his brother's untimely passing.

Posted on August 29, 2025 in Featured Review

Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race, by Nico Slate. Temple, 2023. 248p, ISBN 9781439923825 $30.00, ISBN 9781439923849

Nico Slate’s Brothers is a memoir of loss. Like many other memoirs of this genre, this volume is a deeply personal account of grief and absence. The loss of Nico’s brother Peter Slate has become one of the defining events in his life. What makes this volume evocative and unique is its authorship—Brothers is written by a well-respected historian rather than a fiction writer, essayist, or journalist. This mid-career pivot for a historian is both unusual and precarious; while Slate (Carnegie Mellon Univ.) has made the history of social movements (many of which center on concepts of race) the lynchpin that holds his body of work together, this highly personal account, which positions himself and Peter at the center of the narrative, is a highly unusual choice for a professional historian. Slate reflects on what has become a trend of the twenty-first century: historians acknowledging that the personal is historical and that the self—in this case, his relationship with his brother—is a subject worthy of study. The author works as a historian throughout this book, uncovering new sources of primary source materials, including interviews with friends, data on broken computers, suitcases full of rap lyrics and musings, and countless photos. Like other historical works, it includes a chronology and a list of references and further readings.

Nico Slate and I have a great deal in common. We are both white men who are members of multi-racial families. We both only had one brother, whom we lost at a relatively young age. We are both historians whose siblings took paths that were quite different from our own. Both of our brothers had issues with addiction. The emotional grooves that Slate cuts with this volume run deep for this reviewer and not always in a comfortable fashion. When one has one brother, their lives intertwine in a number of ways, but not always in a straightforward manner. Nico idolized his brother Peter growing up, but developed his own sense of self and gained confidence as he grew. Slate writes, “The distance between us grew after I left for college … He was changing too. It saddens me that some of the most dramatic and difficult moments in his life happened when I was thousands of miles away” (p. 175). There is an unspoken “what could I have done to save him” quality that resonates throughout the book, which is relatable for many of us whose family members die young.

… the historian mourns not really knowing his brother as an adult and not necessarily understanding Peter’s inner life.

One could make comparisons to one of the seminal memoirs of loss of the twenty-first century,  Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). However, while Didion lost her longtime husband and daughter in a relatively short amount of time, she had known both family members for almost their entire lives. The essayist mourned what she had lost and the key figures in her adult life. Slate, on the other hand, often focuses on what could have been. Nico Slate was only twenty-three years old when his thirty-year-old brother died; the historian mourns not really knowing his brother as an adult and not necessarily understanding Peter’s inner life.

One of the central themes of Brothers is the exploration of race. Peter Slate had originally been christened Uderulu Peter Houston Carl Osakwe in 1972 to Karen Slate, a white American woman, and Chukwudi Osakwe, a Nigerian student in the United States. Only five years after the Loving v. Virginia (1967) Supreme Courtdecision that legalized interracial marriage nationwide, Uderulu (who would become Peter) lived the life of an interracial child. His father was absent for most of his life, and this lack of a Black father figure would be crucial to his psychological development. Nico Slate was born in 1980; while he was also born with the surname Osakwe, his father was a white American, and his whiteness became one of the critical differences between him and his brother.

Slate spends the entire volume considering the impact that race had on the trajectory of his brother’s life. One may argue that this obsession with his brother’s racial identity is overblown, but Slate raises questions that, frankly, very few academics acknowledge. The impact of race upon socioeconomic development, cultural capital, and longevity are often written about on a macro-level; what the author does in this volume is question whether pivotal events in his brother’s life—the loss of an eye as a late teenager, his eventual hip-hop career and his premature death—were caused by the racist structure of American society. Slate’s close proximity to Peter, a Black man, makes him more aware of racial difference than the vast majority of white men out there. In the Trumpian world in which race as a category is seemingly erased, Slate acknowledges that race played a pivotal role in his brother’s life in both minor and major ways.

As an adolescent, Peter traversed between being the only Black member of his immediate family, assimilating into a dominant white culture, and fitting into ‘Black’ culture.

One of the primary organizational tools Slate uses when describing his brother’s life is the process of naming. His brother was born Uderulu Osakwe, but by the time he entered middle school, he was Peter Slate. It was easier for his upper-class Los Angeles grandparents, with whom they lived, to pronounce, and an antagonistic relationship with his Nigerian family helped cement this name change. As an adolescent, Peter traversed between being the only Black member of his immediate family, assimilating into a dominant white culture, and fitting into “Black” culture. Slate writes, “he couldn’t decide what was considered ‘Black’ in Los Angeles in 1988. Throughout his life, he had to navigate social expectations to manage his Blackness. When he was a child, Mom was his ally … Everything changed when my brother became a teenager. Mom helped open the door to Blackness; now she was an obstacle, and so was I” (p. 93). It is this sensitivity that makes Brothers exceptional. The rawness of Slate’s emotions when writing such prose is still so fresh that one cannot help but acknowledge its sincerity and love. 

The final name change was the transition to becoming XL the II. Uderulu/Peter was a large man—six foot six, handsome, with an eye patch. He stuck out in a crowd. As Slate writes, “Children pointed. Most were more intrigued than scared” (p. 144). In the last chapter of his life, he became a rapper under the stage name XL, palling around with Cypress Hill and other Southern California musical groups as he became involved in the hip-hop community. During the last spring of his life, he co-hosted Mass Distortion on Power 106, a key radio station in Los Angeles. The program’s tag line was “where hip-hop meets rock.” This, in a sense, could also sum up Uderulu/Peter/XL’s life—where whiteness met Blackness, where the wealth and privilege of his white grandparents met the poverty of his immediate family.

The eventual fate of Nico’s brother was tragedy—Peter was killed in a horrific traffic accident on July 4, 2003. However, the organizational scheme that Slate uses when describing the lives of himself and his brother does not always center on that tragedy. For one, his brother seemed to be a remarkably charismatic brother and man. He lived many lives in his short time on earth, auditioning for The Real World, working as Kelly LeBrock’s bodyguard, writing screenplays, and traveling and performing with Cypress Hill and Linkin Park, all before he turned thirty. But what sticks, what one does not forget, is the deep love that Peter had for Nico. He was the ultimate big brother. This comes across through the numerous stories the author relates and through the photos included in the volume. In one touching example, the author relates how when he decided to find his own father, who was absent his entire life, Peter not only took him to his father’s office, but also prepared a list of questions, eventually driving him home. Slate fondly remembers, “There he was, the big brother listening patiently … When I was done, he leaned in and put his hand on my knee. ‘I’m proud of you, bro. It took courage to do what you did’” (p. 173).

… Slate weaves larger events of late twentieth-century American history throughout this book and interrogates the impact they have had on himself and his brother …

Being the historian he is, Slate weaves larger events of late twentieth-century American history throughout this book and interrogates the impact they have had on himself and his brother, including the Rodney King verdict and ensuing riot, the O. J. Simpson trial, and Magic Johnson’s HIV diagnosis. In their time together, Peter would take Nico into all-Black environments, such as barber shops and rap sessions. He always let people know that Nico was his brother, a sentiment borne not out of a need for “protection” but out of a deep brotherly love.

In the end, though, this is a memoir of loss. Reflecting on the tremendous support he received from his brother shortly after his first encounter with his father, Slate writes, “I thanked him for his help and told him that I loved him. Now, I see that wasn’t enough” (p. 173). We all navigate a life of diversity in twenty-first-century America. Slate is smart enough to understand the tremendous role that race and difference have played in his life. It has helped define his family and remains the cornerstone of his work. The questions of “what could have been” or “what can be” continue to loom over our nation, as they do in Slate’s work.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – History, Geography & Area Studies – North America

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Gerald R. Butters, Jr. is Professor of History at Aurora University. He received his PhD in history from the University of Kansas.

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If you enjoyed reading this review, be sure to check out Choice’s archive of featured reviews. We publish a new one every month. A few related ones include:

	Zacharia Nchinda’s review of Raceless (2021), “Colorblindness Is Identity Theft: Acknowledging Racist Histories to Create Diverse Futures“
	James Borchert’s review of Shelter (2021), “A Complicated Homecoming: Lawrence Jackson Dissects Baltimore’s Racist Legacies in Shelter“
	Luis H. Moreno’s review of Compton in My Soul (2024), “Revisiting El Barrio: Compton Receives a Personal Reappraisal from Albert M. Camarillo“

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